Climate Surfing: a Conceptual Guide to Drafting Conservation Easements in the Age of Global Warming

Journal of Civil Rights and Economic Development Volume 23 Issue 3 Volume 23, Fall 2008, Issue 3 Article 4 October 2008 Climate Surfing: A Conceptual Guide ot Drafting Conservation Easements in the Age of Global Warming James L. Olmsted Esq. Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarship.law.stjohns.edu/jcred Recommended Citation Olmsted, James L. Esq. (2008) "Climate Surfing: A Conceptual Guide ot Drafting Conservation Easements in the Age of Global Warming," Journal of Civil Rights and Economic Development: Vol. 23 : Iss. 3 , Article 4. Available at: https://scholarship.law.stjohns.edu/jcred/vol23/iss3/4 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Journals at St. John's Law Scholarship Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Journal of Civil Rights and Economic Development by an authorized editor of St. John's Law Scholarship Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected]. CLIMATE SURFING: A CONCEPTUAL GUIDE TO DRAFTING CONSERVATION EASEMENTS IN THE AGE OF GLOBAL WARMING JAMES L. OLMSTED, ESQ.* INTRODUCTION A. As the Ice Caps Melt This article is directed to the land trust community and to oth- er individuals and organizations that seek to preserve and pro- tect land through conservation easements. "It begins with the assumption, based upon overwhelming scientific data and analysis, that global warming is here and is having disastrous effects. To support this assumption, this article provides the reader with citations to a mountain of research and scholarship that has been published on the subject of climate change in the past three years. Given the reality of global warming, this article examines how conservation easements should be drafted to help deal with the sweeping and devastating changes global warming will bring. This article is a sequel to a previous law review article ad- dressing many of the same core issues.' Thus, this article covers some previously trodden ground, but in new ways. Like its pre- decessor, this article argues that upon any easement termina- * Jim Olmsted is a graduate of the University of California at Davis, School of Law. He is licensed to practice law in California, Nevada, Oregon and Washington. He is the founder and owner of Conservation and Preservation Counsel, L.L.C., a Eugene, Oregon, based law firm that specializes in representing land trusts and landowners in land conservation acquisitions. See James L. Olmsted, Capturing the Value of Appreciated Development Rights on Conservation Easement Termination, 30 ENVIRONS ENVTL. L. & POLY'Y J. 39 (Fall 2006). ST JOHN'SJOURNAL OFLEGAL COMMENTARY [Vol. 23:3 tion, it is the holder of a conservation easement, and not the un- derlying landowner, that is entitled to the appreciated value of the development rights held in abeyance by a conservation easement. In addition, both articles also address conservation easement provisions that would calculate and direct such appreciated value to the easement holder and that would also prevent the landowner from receiving an unwarranted windfall. Finally, both articles discuss a new type of conservation easement, namely an "ark" easement, which is intended to assist species and eco- systems in global warming caused migrations by being termina- ble at the easement holder's option. However, unlike the previous article, this article devotes additional attention to what will be one of the most prominent effects of climate change, namely the mass migrations of plant and ani- mal species as they "climate surf' to keep pace with the underly- ing pole-ward shifts in the climates in which they evolved. As well as raising awareness of the general need to address these climate change issues in future conservation easements, this article proposes certain specific changes in drafting conservation easements which should be incorporated in all new conservation easements even now, as the ice caps melt. 2 While reviewing both 2 See WILLIAM SWEET, KICKING THE CARBON HABIT: GLOBAL WARMING AND THE CASE FOR RENEWABLE AND NUCLEAR ENERGY 1, 136-37 (Columbia University Press 2006) (noting that "Arctic ice has thinned by as much as 40 percent in the last three decades," and also recording the chronology of loss of Antarctic ice: in 1995, Larsen A ice shelf disintegrated; in 1998, the Wilkins ice shelf collapsed; in 2002, the Larsen B ice shelf shattered); see also MARLA CONE, SILENT SNOW: THE SLOW POISONING OF THE ARCTIC 169 (Grove Press 2005) ("As global temperatures rise, the higher latitudes are particularly vulnerable to pro- nounced effects, and substantial changes in the ice have already been documented."); DAVID HELVARG, BLUE FRONTIER: DISPATCHES FROM AMERICA'S OCEAN WILDERNESS 118 (Sierra Club Books 2006) (on file with author) ("Since 1970 climatologists have predicted that global warming, as it kicks in, would occur most rapidly at the poles, a fact now con- firmed by scientists in Alaska, Canada, and Greenland, at the North Pole, and here on the Antarctic Peninsula."); GEORGE OCHOA, JENNIFER HOFFMAN & TINA TIN, CLIMATE: THE FORCE THAT SHAPES OUR WORLD AND THE FUTURE OF LIFE ON EARTH (Rodale 2005) (revealing in a summary of Chapter 6, "Melting Snow and Ice," that, "[d]ramatic evidence shows that climate in the polar and alpine regions is changing at alarming speeds, melting glaciers and reducing ice coverage in crucial places, and exerting a profound effect on global climate."); Andrew C. Revkin, Arctic Ice Melting Faster Than Expected, N.Y. TIMES, Dec. 12, 2006 at F3 (describing emerging scientific predictions regarding increased rates at which Arctic ice is melting); DOUG MACDOUGALL, FROZEN EARTH: THE ONCE AND FUTURE STORY OF ICE AGES 233 (University of California Press 2004) ("Recent concern about global warming, and especially the impact of mankind's addition of greenhouse gases to the natural atmospheric inventory, has led to increased awareness of the role these gases may play in starting or ending ice ages."); Paul Nicklen, Life at the Edge, NAT'L GEOGRAPHIC, June 2007, available at http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/ 2008] CLIMATE SURFING articles would allow the reader to see how the ideas in the present article have evolved and changed, this article is suffi- ciently self-contained that it is not necessary to read the prior article by way of an introduction. B. A Scientific Certainty Neither the existence nor the imminence of global warming is any longer subject to scientific doubt. The world's scientific community stands in complete consensus on the issue of global warming. Not only will human-caused global warming occur, it is already occurring. Likewise, not only will such human-caused global warming open a Pandora's Box of disastrous human and environmental consequences, many such consequences are already here. Indeed, climate scientists have already moved beyond describing the nature and effects of global warming to the "autobiographical" phase of writing their own histories of the discovery of global warming and climate change. 3 To repeat, no ra- tional and informed mind could doubt the existence and imminence of global warming and its dire consequences.4 Accordingly, 0706/featurel/ (documenting our planet's dwindling supply of polar ice); Tim Appenzeller, The Big Thaw, NAT'L GEOGRAPHIC, June 2007, available at http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/O706/feature2/ (warning, surprisingly, for this periodical, that "[ilt's no surprise that a warming climate is melting the world's glaciers and polar ice. But no one expected it to happen this fast."). 3 See SPENCER R. WEART, THE DISCOVERY OF GLOBAL WARMING, ix-x (Harvard Univer- sity Press 2003) (describing a website, found at http://www.aip.org/history/climate/, which contains over two dozen essays running in parallel, interconnected by over 700 hyper- links, and with references to over 1,000 scientific and historical publications); see general- ly GALE E. CHRISTIANSON, GREENHOUSE: THE 200-YEAR STORY OF GLOBAL WARMING (Walker & Co. 1999) (providing a study of the greenhouse effect and its impact on human history); MATTHEW J. HOFFMANN, OZONE DEPLETION AND CLIMATE CHANGE: CONSTRUCTING A GLOBAL RESPONSE (SUNY Press 2005) (highlighting emerging global responses to climate change and ozone depletion since the 1980's). 4 Because of the overwhelming consensus among the global scientific community regarding the imminence and likely disastrous consequences of global warming and global climate change, it is difficult to find any credible evidence or analysis to the contrary. Nevertheless, a number of so-called "disinformation specialists" have managed to publish challenges to the global consensus. Notable among such authors for his overly confident and under-researched writing style is Robert G. Williscroft, author of THE CHICKEN LITTLE AGENDA: DEBUNKING "EXPERTS"' LIES. ROBERT G. WILLISCROFT, THE CHICKEN LITTLE AGENDA: DEBUNKING "EXPERTS" LIES, (Pelican Publishing Company 2006). As it is beyond the scope of this article to rebut a work such as THE CHICKEN LITTLE AGENDA: DEBUNKING "EXPERTS" LIES, suffice it to say that anyone not already pre-disposed to dis- believe the vast majority of the world's scientists will find Williscroft's prose self- rebutting. A further reason for dismissing this book is its remarkable lack of citation to a single scientific study and the book's reliance on a mere thirty or so secondary sources, ST JOHN'SJOURNAL OFLEGAL COMMENTARY [Vol. 23:3 this article will not spend much time arguing the existence of human-caused global warming and climate change. It is already here, and there is an immense and ever-growing body of evidence 5 to prove it. most of them too dated to have even considered the current overwhelming body of scientific evidence supporting the existence of global warming. In a category related to those ideologues that dismiss the painstakingly formulated consensus of the world's premier scientists on the subject of global warming are those who admit to the problem but believe descriptions of its intractability to be exaggerated.

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